Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld

I would like to offer a somewhat different perspective on this product. I am not a business person; my thinking and needs are very different from a business person's. I am a reader, writer, teacher. Moreover, I am a very disorganized person. I thought maybe if I had a device that could centralize all the various elements of my life effectively, I could have some peace of mind. I have never owned an electronic tool of this sort. After reading and investigation on various brands, I chose this one. I have to say, it is one of the easiest electronic tools I have ever used. I didn't buy it for the bluetooth capability, so I can't speak to that. But it is a wonderfully easy and handy tool for keeping apointments straight and having contact information handy anywhere. Reading through the description of the E2, I was initially afraid that I would have to buy Microsoft Outlook in order to be able to have a calendar and appointment capability, but this is not true. The CD that comes with the E2 has those features--and many more--on it. As a writer, I appreciate the "Documents to go" feature. It is so easy to transfer Word documents to the Palm, and I have put several of my favorite poems on it. I have also bought a little keyboard to go with my Palm so that I can work on poems/stories while away. It is so much more compact than my laptop (and I have the smallest laptop that Dell ever made). It probably wouldn't be a good choice for writing the "Great American Novel" on, but for capturing those ideas that just can't wait, and when your brain is working faster than you can write by hand, this is a great device. I write a lot when I travel. I can also put my lecture-PowerPoints on the device so that I can review them anywhere. Finally, with expansion cards, you can also carry music, photos, and video with you. I do have a 60GB iPod, but, frankly, I am reluctant to carry it with me on some of my more rugged road/boat trips. And, as much as I love my iPod, I still find putting photos on it to be a confusing process. (I am not that technically savvy.) But the E2 works like a dream; simply drag and drop the photos, music, video that you want and there it is! The E2 also has a small speaker which works surprising well and I use it for listening to poems. A headphone jack allows for a richer experience for listening to music. The only downside is that the E2 doesn't have much memory and the expansion cards can be expensive. But I've decided the expense is worth it because now I can carry so many of my precious documents with me in once device which is fairly rugged (at least compared to the iPod which does not have the more stable flash drive that the E2 does). So I can use my iPod to store ALL of my music, to plug into my home speakers, and to take on short, easy adventures. But the E2 can go with me practically everywhere. The E2 is small, light, fast, easy to use. I really, really like it.

I have had Palm devices since they first came out. I currently have a desktop PC, 2 laptops, and 2 iPads. I have tried to get away from the Tungsten 2E for for years but NOTHING does what they do nearly a well as they do it. They are clearly the best appointment, calendar, contact list around. You will never be late for an appointment again. No iPad app on my $600 dollar iPad will quickly setup a repeating appointment in a complex manner like: the the 2nd Sunday every other month. No app will start to notify me with a beep 1 day, 1 week, 1 hour, or minute before the appointment or task and continue to beep me every 5 or ten minutes until I acknowledge it and either silence it with one touch or put it on snooze to remind me again. Such a system is only good if you keep it with you, so you have it as soon as you commit to a new task and enter it immediately. The Tungsten can always be in a shirt pocket or purse my iPad cannot be. If you forget it, when you finally retrieve it, there it is beeping every 5 minutes for your appointment. No iPad app will do that. It has a great "To do list" with priority rankings, great software so you can enter everything with a keyboard and sync it to your Tungsten. If you ever run over it with a car, get another, re-sync it and never miss a beat. This brings me to durability. I have dropped then hundreds of times and always cringe but never did more than scuff them up. I have dropped one into a storm drain grate, washed them in a front loader with laundry, dropped one in my Lilly pond and salvaged them all after drying them out. One I warped with too much heat because I got impatient and forgot to go back and check on it while drying it out. I was still able to hot sync it and buy another. They have great battery life. If I was going out of town for less than a week, I never took my charger. I could go on and on but I will jump to the limited short-comings. The Cons: They are older technology so less ebooks and less sharing of data, no surfing the internet, no email, etc. They have one notorious flaw where the touch screen can get so out of whack that you cannot calibrate it. This does not happen often. When it does just let it run down by running some function non-stop, then recharge it.

DO NOT BUY Palm was mediocre, but workable at first. Pros were that it had a nice screen (at first) and good battery life. CONS-aside from the fact it resets itself several times per day, the screen stopped working shortly after buying it. It was unreadable, with multicolored stripes through the screen. They also will not ship you a replacement in advance unless you pay an extra $40 (if you bought a palm to manage your schedule, chances are you can't wait several weeks to mail it in, have it repaired, and get it back, right?). After getting the repair, a few months passed, the warranty expired, and the screen broke again. This time it stopped working all together. Palm wanted over $100 to repair it (a month out of warranty). The repair was more than 1/2 the cost of just buying a new one! Since I did not plan on buying a new version of a model that broke twice and had horrible customer service, I looked for help in the Palm online forums at their website. Searching for help with "Tungsten E2 won't turn on" I found out many other users have the same problem. So far, around 90 other posts by people with the same problem. BOTTOM LINE: Palm has a defect in its product, but has horrible customer support and will not acknowledge it. So a flaw in its production may cost you over $100 for a repair. True, most people won't have the same problem, but would you buy a car from a company that covered up it's defects and made the consumer pay for it rather than fixing it?

Nearly 6 years after hanging up my screen-cracked m515 for a vintage Thinkpad I snapped up this E2 from PDA King for $18.05 -- free postage and arrived in three days! I have no complaints and for the price.you'd think it'd look battered up but it's virtually good as new, all cables and CD included! I'm a little prejudiced because I was familiar with Palms before so set-up and had the backup files from my previous Palms was a non-adventure though getting Bluetooth going from the PC side was a pain. My PC runs XP so no hassle installing Palm there, but if you have beyond that best check Palm forums to deal with your system. As with my past Palms I recommend installing "Launcher X" from Palm sites for better ease of use. Again, it has to be stressed a thousand times to newbies that Palms are NOT mini-laptops or smartphones and don't expect them to act it. They do excellent at what PC basics they do -- and for over ten year old technology! Now I ordered an extra battery during my purchase to hedge against how old the battery must be, but I was surprised it arrived with *85% charge and it's still ticking wel, thank you PDA King!! I made a great purchase which has a surprising twist because soon as I ordered the Wifi stick at $15.00 at eBay, I discovered PDA King had the Palm TX with its built in wifi going for $33.00! Had I not been in such a rush to grab the E2 at that price I would've noticed and bought the TX at less the combo price of the E2 and Wifi stick together! Sigh! But such is life but I don't regret my E2 purchase and recommend this machine to all!

I had a Tungston E2 that died after ?? 10 years or so. I moped around for a while (The Palm company is dead & buried, etc) but then had an inspiration and went out on Amazon to see what I could see about E2s. I found an outfit called Guaranteed Tech that had some for sale. Apparently they bought up all the new E2s sitting around (In Palm Warehouses or wherever. maybe at HP places) plus a bunch of E2s that I guess didn't work anymore. They tested them all, reconditioned those that they could, and put them all up for sale. They put new batteries in all the unused E2s, and did whatever they could to get the others to work also. I ordered a new one and it arrived a few days later and worked like a champ right out of the box, with one MAJOR exception. It wouldn't interface with my computer which had with all the old Palm E2 stuff already out there. I called Guaranteed Tech and spent the next TWO HOURS working with a guy there (I think he's the owner or some such). He was very patient with me and we tried one thing after another and eventually the interface started interfacing. The problem was apparently that the old UserID on my machine wouldn't interface with the same UserId on the new Palm, or some such. Whatever. Anyway, my new Palm is now up and running and interfacing like a champ. I lost all the data on the old one but that was partly due to auto backup that I had running weekly, PLUS dear ol' McAffee antivirus software. t apparently didn't like all the new stuff trying to get into my machine or somesuch. We disabled McAfee for a while, did a few other things, and now my new E2 is working like a champ and interfacing beautifully. God Bless Guaranteed Tech! Would I recommend Guaranteed Tech to anyone else? YOU BET!

Despite all the research/reviews and cross checks to make sure I made the best choice for my media needs, I missed the biggest issue of hot sync compatibility. Evidently, it's a problem that drives many owners nuts. I've gone to product support, user forums and done all the recommended fixes: drivers, rear ports, all the ports, com checks, etc. Tried it on 3 different systems of 2 different desktops with Win XP, home edition, svc pack 2, Win 2000, and still can't get the computer and the Palm to connect. (All requirements met but a small percentage of owners can't sync) Updated with the software CD provided, oneline version 4.1.4E and still can't fix the issue. This beautiful device is absolutely useless if the owner can't get the desktop to transfer information. This was my Christmas gift that is rapidly becoming a white elephant and I may ultimately have to swallow the loss in restock/shipping and cut my losses. I had 2 previous Palms, last one was V and it has provided a lot of happy usage as an electronic text storage for lessons/books and such at only 2MB. Thought upgrading would be a happy advance but it's just not connecting. So next time, I'm finding someone with a PDA first to test my computer before buying an upgrade. Amazon service was absolutely wonderful. Hot Sync issues are just flummoxing me and makes me sad that I can't get this tool to work. The desktop loaded new code, pictures, and PDFs and it was very exciting until the roadblock on the sync cable. No way to patch up with previous versions/tools. :+(

UPDATE: I installed the Phone Link updater from Palm's web site, and can use my Nokia 6102's (WAP) net connection to surf the net. Keep in mind how much data you have -- real net access will eat up, say, 5MB *really* quickly, so keep track of this unless you want huge phone bills (or just get unlimited net access). I also bought a 1GB SD card (Kingston; it was $30.15 on Amazon -- great deal!); it works perfectly. Great PDA. I bought mine mostly to keep track of homework, since my old PDAs (2 Visors and a Sony Clie) were dead or dying. After months of deliberation between the E2 and the z22, I picked the E2. I figured that it would hopefully last a while, so I'd get the better of the two. I love it. The screen is *beautiful*. When I look back at my Clie SL10, I wonder how I was able to stand using it as my regular PDA. Anyway, yeah... great screen. It comes with a photo viewer, which works well. A tad slow flipping through photos on the memory card, but that might just be my memory card (it isn't a particularly fancy one; I think it was the cheapest one they had). The speaker is... amazing. It's better than the ones on my iBook. It actually has midrange and a bit of bass. There's a headphone jack, so you can use headphones and everything, but it's actually feasible to fill a (small) room with the sound from an E2. I use RealPlayer for music most of the time; it can multitask. Occasionally, when another app accesses the card, the music skips or cuts out for a second, but they's expected. Frankly, I'm amazed that it *can* multitask. When I want louder music, I use TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player). It's a 3rd-party, free, open-source media player that also plays videos. Yup... the E2 can do video. I haven't tried RealPlayer for video yet. And yes, you can play two MP3s at once (RealPlayer in the background, TCPMP in the foreground.) As for other stuff... it comes with Documents To Go 7, with native document support, which means that you don't need to convert documents -- just stick them on the memory card. I haven't actually used this yet, so no word on how it keeps formatting, but if it's anything like it does normally, it's probably better than Pocket Word on a Pocket PC. It has Bluetooth; I haven't tried it, as I have nothing else to try it with, but it does work (paired it with someone's Motorola RAZR to test it.) On the topic of connecting to phones -- I haven't managed to get net access via IR via my Nokia 6102 (Cingular), but it can use the Dialer app to dial my phone. So I can dial any number in my Palm's address book... excuse me... "Contacts". [goes off and mutters about how Palm changed all the app names to fit Outlook]. Oh yeah -- I can beam photos from my phone (it's a camera phone) to my Palm. And then put them on my computer. I'm on OS X; Palm Desktop works well; it's still basically Claris Organizer. There's a "Send To Handheld" droplet that converts photos, videos, etc. to send to the Palm. Oddly enough, it seems to be able to install stuff in the middle of a HotSync. Last time I checked, it wouldn't let you queue up anything to install during a HotSync. Not with this -- it'll go and install it! Really cool. Anyway, great PDA. If you're really into music, I'd recommend getting a 512MB or 1GB SD card; it doesn't come with one. (I'm using the 64MB one I bought for my HP49g+ calculator... not nearly enough space for music.) It comes with a universal screen protector, which, after cutting to the correct size marked on the plastic backing, will be very useful for people like me who are worried about scratching their brand new PDA. One thing to take into consideration is the warranty. It's only 90 days. $50 at Palm's online store will get you a 1-year warranty that includes one screen replacement. If you register the E2 before you buy it, they give you (or at least they gave me) a 20% off coupon, making it $40. Just keep this in mind... Overall, excellent PDA. Haven't had any problems. It does everything I need, and probably 20 billion things I have no use for. It's cool.

I had doubts about buying a Handheld, in case I was merely giving way to a desire to possess clever little gadgets. However, after owning the Tungsten E2 for a month I am completely converted (and I am only using some of its many functions). I find it enormously useful to have all my addresses (email and snail mail), telephone numbers, "To do" lists, memos, diary, and everything else in one place, knowing I will never again have to copy out data when my address book becomes full or out of date, or lose bits of paper with vital information on them. Whenever I come across anything noteworthy that I need to remember, I enter it then and there. The E2 has non-volatile memory, and I back up regularly on my computer, so I will never lose this information. You can easily download documents. So I have, for example, my list of CDs, so that if I am in a shop or at a concert, I can check whether I might be duplicating something I already have. I can keep track of medications taken, and my blood pressure, or whatever. I also bought the Palm portable keyboard, which fits in a pocket. Instead of lugging around my portable computer, I can set this up in 30 seconds and take notes at any meeting or seminar. Amazing!